Flu/Cold Drugs - blessing or bane?

This, in my morning paper:

“Roche Holding AG…warned of reports that people taking…Tamiflu have experienced delirium and abnormal behavior leading to injury or death.”

Yikers, is this a case of the prevention being worse than the affliction? Not that I’ve ever been one to avoid the doc’s office, but I’m also not an alarmist either and didn't race to his office with every bug that invaded my kids when they were young. I knew he was always a phone call away if things got serious.

I’m also not much of a pill popper. Well okay, there was that one time my doc gave me a few pills, saying that the drug rep was convinced they were the bee’s knees in reducing the effects of a cold. Our collective shrug communicated doubt to those assertions, but I had a big book event and needed to have all cylinders running. I took the pills. Instead of simply feeling like crap, I was groggy, my teeth itched, my hair hurt, and I got a rash on my neck. Horrified at my blunder, I stumbled into the bookstore looking and feeling like a castaway from Lost.

My outward condition hardly bespoke my faith in “Reiki Master, work on thyself,” as I scratched at the rash and blew my nose. I faced the largely CAM crowd and admitted that I’d popped a cold pill, and that I might not make a whole lot of sense. I could hear the collective intake of breath.

“Why didn’t you give yourself a Reiki treatment?”

“Because I’m an idiot,” was the best thing I could conjure up in my drug-induced haze.

I can’t be certain, but I believe I had an audience of about 40 and sold 1 book. 1 freaking book. Talk about a credibility killer.

Conversely, my son was coming down with this God-awful flu that’s going around. He came over and had me Reiki him for an hour. I Reiki’d him again the next day. He ended up with a sore throat. My daughter, on the other hand, hates me to Reiki her. She got sicker than a dog for three weeks.

I know, I know, we can’t say one way or another that my son wouldn’t have gotten as sick as my daughter had I not Reiki’d him. But I can say that I would never allow these flu/cold drugs to find their way into my family’s digestive tracts either. It could be the last thing they ever do.